


Under a Falcon's Wing

by FrolickingFanGirl15



Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
Genre: Eventual Romance, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Mentor/Protégé, Not Beta Read, Slow Burn, Slow To Update
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-27
Updated: 2017-08-25
Packaged: 2018-09-02 13:52:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8670196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrolickingFanGirl15/pseuds/FrolickingFanGirl15
Summary: Young Raoul de Chagny's childhood friend, potential love, and singing star Christine Daae has been kidnapped by a mysterious scoundrel. As he heads into the surprising depths of the Palais Garnier he's joined by an equally mysterious Persian man who has a history with scoundrel, but wants to help him save Christine. Raoul is over confident despite his inexperience, melodramatically in love, and self-absorbed without actually knowing himself. However this changes as he begins to know himself when he's taken under the Persian's wing.





	1. Seeking

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first ever published fan fiction. I hope it does justice to Gaston Leroux's great characters and novel. I hope you enjoy this frolicking and fumbling around in Leroux's creation. I'm drawing from Leroux's novel and the Phantom of the Opera 1925 film with Lon Chaney for the canon material. I'm new to the Phantom Phandom and I have to give a big THANK-YOU to my friend Katrina for sharing her love this story with me and letting me read her copy of the novel. I don't think I would have written this piece, or even gotten an AO3 account without her encouragement and enthusiasm. Thank-you my friend this piece in its entirety, is dedicated to you. 
> 
> Hayley ^_^

Raoul pushed the Persian’s hand away, and combed his free hand through his blond hair, self-possessed boyish. The Persian would have given an exasperated sigh, if it weren’t for the fact, that they were in the Trapdoor Lover’s dark labyrinth at that very moment. Again with his gun hand unconsciously lowering from eye level. The Persian’s heart seemed to skip a beat as Raoul added his voice to his physical flippancy.

  
“You’re too close to this Monster Persian. It’s addling your courage. We’ve got no time to lose! Christine needs me!”  


  
The Persian swallowed and his jaw muscles flexed in tension. _Try and stay patient, he’s young he doesn’t know who we’re up against._ He tried to remind himself. Raoul turned on his heel and started on again in speech and on foot, just keeping within the beam of the Persian’s lantern. The remaining width of the passage was a tunnel of jet black around them. 

  
“I’m not afraid of the dangers of this scoundrel. I was ready to face the frigid suffering of the northernmost seas!” Raoul ’s gun hand still straying-- now nearly to the breast pocket.  
_I can’t! He’s going to get himself strangled. Even after I’ve come this far I’m not sure I can go on alone..._  


  
The Persian seized Raoul by the shoulder of his evening jacket swung the younger man on his heel pinning the flat of his back to the damp bone gnawing cold of the cellar wall. The turn and pin carried enough momentum when Raoul hit the wall it rattled the breath out of his throat. The Persian braced him there with his forearm. His gun still at eye level , now close enough to save them both need be.

  


“Listen to me!” The Persian said, his voice thin and tense through his tight throat. The hair the back of his neck stood up despite his urgency and irritation. “I know your thoughts are only for Christine, but they work against you, not for you. You are in love with the idea of love. You love the idea of Christine. That’s very dangerous for both of you. If you want to save, even see her again, you’ve got to keep your gun at eye level. Erik will strangle the life out of you, leave your eyes so filled with hemorrhaged vessels, that even if you still breathe you’d never live with all the damage. He’s done it before, with men of higher status, and twenty times more guarded.”

  


  
Raoul stared back it him, in the stark lantern his eyes were wide and glittering. The Persian gave a breath and swallowed. He knew Westerners had very strict codes of conduct between gentlemen, this was unacceptable. On the other hand knew he had to pull the younger man out of his bravado, if they had a chance to get Christine and themselves out.

 

*

  
Raoul’s heart leapt into his throat, as he was seized and pinned to the wall. No one, who wasn’t a peer in childhood horsing around with him, had ever handled him in such a manner. His eyelids fluttered with some flustered blinks. A stream of outraged comments floated up in his mind. How dare you? You forget yourself! Do not! Make presumptions about my feelings for Christine, foreigner! But none of these words actually came and all he could do for several heartbeats was stare back into the Persian’s deep green-brown eyes. It was like he was noticing the man for the first time. The Persian’s dark eyebrows knitted in concern and his eyes looked apologetic. He let his arm drop from Raoul and stepped back, the lantern light glinted along the lines of his gun, still at eye level as he moved. Raoul didn’t look away, and felt his cheeks heat with a blush. In his fingers, just touching his skin he felt the slightest of weaknesses, the ghost of a tingle.

  


  
It seemed he could see the weight of experience, of travel, of friendships lost, resting on the older man, pulling on his shoulders, tightening his jaw. Those smoky green-brown eyes were so much older than the man’s body.

  


Raoul stepped away from the chilling masonry and straightened his jacket, but it wasn’t a thoughtful movement, it wasn’t edged with anger or disgust at the Persian This time it was a simple reaction conditioned in by the young man’s elite upbringing. The Persian checked the lantern’s fuel and and adjusted the handle against his palm. Perhaps that was a little too much?

  


  
Raoul looked down the corridor off into the distance where their lantern light dwindled into darkness.

  
“He is a sort of terrible murderer? An assassin of silent killings not only a kidnapper?” Raoul asked looking to Persian who stood beside him now. He seemed to be reaching for an answer. After what a couple of moments the man gave a sigh that was that carried the weight of someone who has once said, it doesn’t have to be this way, please!  


  
“He’s a person of genius, his mechanical mind, his musical mind...” The Persian gave a sadness tinged chuckle and shook his head. “I don’t think it’s possible to encounter that brilliance more than once in a lifetime.”  


  
Raoul’s brow knitted and his soft pink lips parted. “--But, sir, you said he was a killer, and you’re well-- afraid of him it seems. You sound like you knew him well?”

  


  
The older man looked Raoul in the face thoughtful, but unabashed. “I do. We connected, we were friends. We were both civic servants, for a time. I’m a Doroga, a chief of police. His connection to the government was much more-- intimate. The Sultan was impressed, and he made the little Sultana laugh. But, genius has it’s prices. Bored genius is dangerous, and given a temperament hardened by pain, can bend it towards darkness. He has hurt people and killed. My appreciation for his skills, my past friendship for him, it can’t dissuade me. I have to do this.” Emotion weighted on the end of his words. His eyes showed conviction and focus that Raoul couldn’t look away from. The Persian started down the corridor again. “You’re right Lord de Chagny, we must go quickly for Christine.”

  


  
Raoul glanced the sweep of the advancing lantern light over his gun barrel, he glanced up to the Persian’s back just ahead of him his shoulders tense, the brighter glint of lantern light on the Doroga’s gun. Raoul’s glance flicked back to his own gun and he raised it up to eye level his fingers white-knuckled around the grip.

  



	2. Hell of Mirrors and Sand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Persian and Raoul de Chagny continue their rescue of Christine Daae deep within the Palais Garnier. Unfortunately for them, just as they think they've found a way into the house they are plunged into a hell of mirrors and sand, the torture chamber. They desperately try to find a way out before they break.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really enjoyed writing this chapter, because I'm a bad person. I hope it is as visceral and quick paced for the reader as was for me as the writer. I realize now the torture chamber is a single hexagonal room, but seem to have added a hallway between two hexagonal rooms, oops >.<;;. I hope you enjoy this chapter! My goal is to have the next chapter out in much shorter order than it took for this one.

Raoul’s breath hitched as the Persian examined a rectangle of stonework. It looked like any other section in the endless, dark, repetitive, hellscape of stonework they found themselves in tonight, the Persian he said. 

"Yes, this will be the spot that will lead us into the house, Miss Daae may even be able to hear us from here. <\p> It took all of Raoul's, already limited control, to keep from pounding on the damn wall, and crying out for her. If he could only hear her voice, he _knew_ the monster hadn't killed her, but to hear her speak, to know she was conscious would take so much weight off his chest. The Persian must have seen the tension in him, or at least was able to guess at his feelings. 

"Steady young friend. We must have caution, if we let our down guard all is lost." 

He touched Raoul's shoulder. Outside of this mad venture Raoul might have given him a dark look for such a companionable assumption after so little time together, but as it was he felt sured up like new timbers added to a sagging fence. He let out a breath.

"We should be able to open this part and get into the house." The Persian explained as he pressed until he his knuckles went white and his forearms shook with the force and his teeth clenched pearly white and striking against the warm olive of his complexion. Raoul added his strength to the Persian's and they both gave a little gasp as the masonry shifted beneath their hands, it didn't crumble apart, it slide like a steel plate slipping past the other part of the wall, like the artful mysterious mechanisms rumored to be found in Pharaohs tombs. 

"Ingenious!" Raoul whispered feeling awed in spite of his rage with this Erik. The Persian gave him a Raoul a rueful smile. 

"He was called the Trapdoor Lover not in jest, but reverence. Quickly now Raoul." The Persian stepped gingerly into the open space. He held the lantern out. "Yes this is it. Remove your shoes and I will drop down then you drop down, fear not." 

The Persian lowered himself down to sit on the edge of what looked to be a shaft leading even lower into the abyss of basements. _Just how much space for props and the like did one theatre need? Even one as lovely as the Palais Garnier!_ Raoul bit his lip as the Persian carefully lowered himself down the near wall of this shaft with cat-like grace that Raoul expected of the mysterious and beautiful Oriental peoples. He glanced over to the Persian's polished black dress shoes sitting at the edge of the dark shaft and felt the bizarreness of the situation plucking like a violin string deep inside him. _How did this happen?_ Only a few hours ago he had been with with Christine beneath the stars and the statue of Apollo at the Lyre, looking into her blue eyes like pools of serene blue water in the mountains. There had been an intense anxiety in them the likes of which he'd never seen in her. Why was she compelled to come back, to sing for him? The scoundrel who hounded her? Now he's gone so far as to kidnap her! _We could have run away together that night... That would have saved her this grief, and perhaps settled the issue of my Brother's concerns too. We could have eloped and settled it all in one go._ Raoul was pulled blinking from his thoughts by a soft _thump_ of the Persian catching himself on his feet. 

Right, de Chagny I've made it down. You do as I did and you won't have any trouble." The Persian advised him from the spotlight of his lantern. Raoul nodded slipping off his shoes and trying to lower himself down, he had ample enough strength, years of sailing practice made certain of that, but he slipped and in reaction he pushed himself away from the wall of the shaft and he was falling just far enough to catch his heart in his throat, then he was in the Persian's arms. 

The Persian gave him a sheepish little smile. His dark features were darkened from above as the lantern lit him from the ground. Raoul heat spread over his cheeks he must be blushing? And his heart was hammering beneath his starched dress shirt. It wasn't the quick fall that had done it, his heart was not so easily startled. He blinked.

"Merci, Monsieur." He said soft.

"De Rien, Monsieur." 

A moment passed where they looked into each other’s eyes, smokey hazel looking into light blue like sea ice. Raoul licked his lips and the Persian lowered him to his feet. Raoul stepped about a foot away, until his heart flew to his throat again with the sickening sensation of the floor giving away beneath his feet. His glance flew to the Persian and he to looked stricken as well not doubt feeling the same as the floor of the whole shaft snapped in half- a trapdoor! A damned trapdoor!

* 

The Persian fell for no more than a couple of seconds, but when his hands and knees hit the sand covered wooden floor the impact ached through his joints. His body shouted out him _Do not. Do that again!_. He winced and heard a cringe-worthy hard bark of air escape Raoul as the young man landed on his back knocking the wind from him. The Persian looked at the golden yellow sand below them. _So like home..._ He thought disconnected. He rubbed some grains between between his thumb and index fingertips. That was when the glint of light shot through his perception and his blood seemed to freeze up. There was a nauseous swell in his throat. His dark eyes widened as his pupils became little more than pinpricks in the sharp light and smothering terror... 

"No! Oh no, no, no! Not this! Not here!"

*** 

There was no mistaking the torture chamber, it was just as it had been in the rosy hours with the Little Sultana. A hexagonal room with a great silver tree with bark of shattered mirror shards, and a noose. He’d seen it’s effects-- more than once, he’d tried to drink and smoke away the nightmares-- more than once... He brought himself up onto his knees with a deep breath. 

“Raoul?” 

“I’m here.” 

He groaned and coughed.

_It’s a shame he’s conscious, awful to think, but given the circumstances. God help us! What do I tell him? Wait! The floor there’s a trapdoor, must be!_

” Raoul! Under the sand, look for another trapdoor! We’ve got to get out, now!” 

The Persian scrabbled about on the floor scraping handfuls of sand away from the floor. _Not there, here maybe, no, there, dammit!_

“Uhhg, uh what? This is...” 

_Raoul--_ Breath caught in the Persian’s lungs. “Raoul, no, don’t look at the mirrors!” It had started... 

*** 

They were surrounded by mirrors floor to ceiling, enveloped in a void of sand and mirrors. Raoul hadn’t noticed the heat, transfixed by the mirrors, until it was hard to breathe, too hot to breathe, and droplets of his sweat rolled down his brow, his neck, his chest. Beams of light from God-knew-where shone over the mirrors darting here there, now here. Were the wall mirrors spinning? Spinning, the world spinning and as a beam of the light pure and bright struck Raoul’s pale eyes the pain was exquisite, unshakable, deep, to the core right, through his head like a bullet. 

“Nnghh! Ahh!” 

Raoul felt himself stagger as his vision blurred and threatened to tunnel. He clutched at his temples squeezing his eyes shut. Once he managed to inhale, he opened them again, sweat streaming off him. The two closest wall sections turned but rather than spinning they opened like double doors leading into a mirror hallway. Before the Persian’s cry could register, before his gentlemen’s upbringing could do anything to help him rationalize, white hot animal terror seized him and he ran like a woodland creature offered an opening in the trap. _Out! Out! Out! God, pleeease! Out! Out! Out!_

*** 

“No! Raoul, no!” The Persian screamed as Raoul ran. The Persian had stood on first hearing Raoul’s initial confusion, but as the chamber came crashing in on his senses too, the Persian was forced to hunker over his knees as the chamber spun. His consciousness spun, his body pressured as if he were at the edge of a giant spinning disc getting the full brunt of the centrifugal force. It wore on his vision, all of him and spots of blackness swam up in the smeared mess of his vision. He staggered and his vision clarified enough for him to see Raoul now a distance down the corridor, what distance he had no way to tell. He reached out his right hand and was able to see himself do it. He heard himself make a sound between a growl and a groan, a sound of unadulterated effort. He squinted his eyes gritting his teeth together and willing himself to attach his senses to his body again. Pouring himself into it he stagger-ran after Raoul. 

The Persian could hardly make out the mirrored passage, and as it flashed with light refraction one moment running then he was in another chamber or the same? He couldn’t tell, couldn’t sense time. He scanned this new part his senses all spinning all pulling him to pieces. He winced and his gaze slipped over a tree. A silver tree gnarled it’s branches contorted reaching towards the mirrored ceiling. The main branches were twice as large as a man’s bicep. It was beautiful and it hurt. The light slid along its surface of hundreds, thousands of little mirrors mimicking treebark. The light flickered and danced in spots. The Persian’s glance lingered along a branch even as the pure piercing light lit his irises and stabbed his pupils. This branch was different this branch held a noose. As far as the Persian could tell it was an ordinary rope, but his skin prickled with gooseflesh and nausea swept through him as he realized he wanted it. In his mind’s eye he imagined slipping the noose over his head nestling the knot against his nape. He imagined the snap of his neck cracking loud and reverberating against the mirrors like a gunshot. He flinched as Raoul cried out. The Persian spun on his heel to see the younger man clawing at his starched collar like a terrified animal caught in a snare. 

“I-I... I can’t! Can’t! Every-thing! Everything _HURTS_!” Roaul’s voice was cracked, but he’d reach a tone that the Persian only heard in a man who just had his leg completely crushed by a railcar years ago. The rush of adrenaline was like an electric shock as Raoul pulled himself from his hands and knees to his feet and his revolver curved toward his head. The Persian rushed Raoul grabbing his wrist and hand with both hands pulling down with shaking panicked strength. The Persian’s eyes followed the glint on cylinder of the revolver. _If I can get it open I can save him!_ His thumb and forefinger struggled on the top strap, stubbed against the firing pin. Raoul's finger found the trigger. The revolver shot in an arc safely over his head, but they had both felt the breeze of it. As a daroga he had spent years working with firearms, but he would later ponder, and not know how he had been able to do what he did now. He seized the top part of the barrel, his palm burning with a sticky sickening sensation as at the same time he took pulled out the cylinder of the revolver despite the familiarity of the reek of gunpowder it still made his stomach clench. The same sticky feel again, and knowledge that his flood of adrenaline was knocking down some of the pain coursing through both hands. The cylinder flipped open and with his thumb pressed into the corner of the frame the daroga whirled away from Raoul, bent over the revolver in his trembling hands. As quick as the exquisite agony would allow daroga picked each bullet and the shell out of the cylinders flicking them aside swearing punctatuating each throw. Somehow, looking back at Raoul was the worst part of the past couple of minutes. He knelt with his hands resting limply against his thighs, tears streamed down his face, so many tears. One tear ran part way down his cheek with new ones already leaking past his eye lashes. He looked up at the daroga with a look like a child that has been hit by a beloved relation with not understanding of why. “Why? Why’d you do that to me?” He sobs shaking their way out of him. The daroga felt sympathy ripple through him, still his mouth set into a line hard line and he threw the revolver with as much strength as he could and it arced far. When it hit it hit wood not sand. The daroga’s heart flip-flopped the _trapdoor_!

*

Raoul watched with a desolate semi-detached emptiness as the Persian ran over in the same direction as the revolver. He started to dig and foot sweep away sand with the ferocity of a lunatic.

”Raoul! The trapdoor! The way out! Help me! Helpmepleeease!” He cried out. Raoul took a breath and felt it kindle a flame in his belly. _there was hope_ He got up as the Persian fell to his knees then he sprinted over to him. The Persian, despite his rich olive complexion, was pale with hints of gray. Raoul squatted down by the other man his hand went to his shoulder trying to brace him. The Persian put his hand over Raoul’s hand and squeezed it, the affection in the gesture, and by the man who’d just saved him made Raoul's chest tighten. The Persian’s eyes were dazed, unfocused, but he turned them to the partially uncovered trapdoor. Now it was his turn to dig and sweep like mad. Once he cleared the door he pulled and pried at it flush with the rest of the wooden floor. He swore as his fingers couldn’t get purchase. His fingernails were neat and short, even at the side seam of the door he couldn’t get in. The Persian gave a shaky breath and collapsed from hands and knees to his stomach. Raoul felt a sob rattle inside of his chest, but he did see grains of sand shift with the Persian’s breath. Raoul’s hands were shaking a he pushed and scratched at the door. His fingers stubbed against the door and a couple of his fingernails bent back as he tried them. Sweat poured down him rolling over his brow surpassing his dark eyebrows and creeping past lashes into his eyes. He blinked pain and sweat flooded his vision, once he blinked it away he and slid his fingers forward he felt his fingertips brush a lip on the trapdoor. He dug in his thumbs curling back the nails driving them white with pressure and force and he lifted trapdoor flinging it up and over with anticlimactic _thump_ , but in the moment it was as beautiful as Christine. He looked to the Persian and seized him by his dress shirt (they had both thrown off their dinner jackets long ago) and hauled him into a sit next to him. His vision blurred and his head swam. _Please! Just a little more! _He grabbed the Persian around the chest and under his arms and with a grimace he hauled him over the black opening of the trapdoor.__

__”I’m sorry.” He said through a tight mouth as a let the Persian drop down into the darkness. He heard him land with a _thud_ several seconds later and his blood fluttered with relief. At least it wasn’t far. He was using the last of his strength he knew, but he lowered himself down a little like a man coming off a pair of rings at a gymnasium and landed softly inches from the Persian. Who let out a soft low moan. Raoul Pulled the Persian out of the trapdoor’s spotlight. He could just make out the shape of barrels stacked on their sides. He leaned the Persian up against a row of the barrels. The Persian mumbled, but it didn’t sound like words. Raoul felt the barrels with half sight in the darkness, but barrels meant wine or water, or merciful god something wet. His throat felt like it had a layer of sand over the flesh. His grabbed a peg wedging closed a barrel. Although his fingers shrieked agony at him he pried the peg loose and thrust his hands in the stream that cascaded out. The sensation of what filled his cupped hands left him with only... _What?_ He rushed over to the spotlight of the trapdoor. If he’d had anything left in him, energy, bile he would have wretched as it was he only trembled. What he held was nothing he’d hoped for or even imagined, but it was unmistakable - gunpowder. He flashed between hot, cold, hot, cold, sick. _This Erik, he’s mad utterly mad!_ Raoul scanned over the scores of barrel this was... this was more than enough to level the Opera kill everyone inside everyone near on the streets. Some of the powder trickled out where his palms met like an hourglass. _He’s ready to die, even for Christine to die...__ _


End file.
